When, if ever, is it acceptable for religious leaders, who reject violence as a matter of religious conviction, to embrace it? In this article about a new documentary entitled CIA in Tibet from Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, columnist Christian Geyer, highlights the parallels between the Dalai Lama and another man of the cloth that embraced CIA assistance to battle communism: Pope John Paul II.
For the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Christian Geyer starts off this way:
The doctrine of two swords exists not only in Christianity, but in the Buddhist tradition as well. The spiritual and temporal swords should work together to heal the world – for example, liberate it from communism. Pope John Paul II maintained connections with the CIA that were central to the Eastern Bloc collapsing without so much as a murmur. The intelligence support of the Polish trade union Solidarno?? is an open secret, and was recently described in Carl Bernstein’s book, His Holiness.
In his early days, the other “Holiness” also took advantage of the CIA’s assistance, as documentary filmmaker Lisa Cathey reminds us: Excerpts from her soon-to-be-released film CIA in Tibet can now be viewed on Kefiblog.com. In the film, retired CIA operatives, from their golf courses and their armchairs, talk about the old days: What it was like back then in the fifties and sixties when Tibetan resistance fighters were trained in the use of weapons, radio technology and guerrilla tactics in order to kill Chinese in Chinese-occupied Tibet. After killing an animal, they prayed, but not when they killed a Chinese, an early resistance fighter explains in the film.
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